Zheng Bo

Zheng Bo was born in Beijing, China in 1974. He holds a PhD in Visual & Cultural Studies from the University of Rochester, and teaches at the School of Creative Media, City University of Hong Kong. Zheng Bo lives and works in Hong Kong.

Zheng Bo has exhibited in many public institutions internationally, and are in the collections of the Guangdong Museum of Art, Hong Kong Museum of Art, and Singapore Art Museum. Recently he produced an online platform (awallproject.net) for the preservation of Chinese socially engaged art, commissioned by Cass Sculpture Foundation, The Space and British Council. He received a Prize of Excellence from the 2005 Hong Kong Art Biennial, and a Juror’s Prize from the Singapore Art Museum in 2008. Zheng lives and works in Hong Kong. His essays on Chinese socially engaged art have been published in multiple journals and books and he is a member of the editorial board of ‘Journal of Chinese Contemporary Art’.

Zheng Bo's practice mainly focuses on socially engaged practice. He often works with a diverse range of communities, which has included the Queer Cultural Centre in Beijing and Filipino domestic helpers in Hong Kong. He also uses a diverse range of materials. Recently he has begun to use plants, conventionally considered weeds, in order to layer his work with political metaphorical symbols, hint at subversion and draw on Chinas rich and complicated history. There is an insidious and critical commentary on social history being played out in Zheng's work that gradually becomes apparent as you begin to understand the intention behind materials and their compositional relation to other objects in works.